Category Archives: Cooking

Toasting shredded coconut is a great way to bring out its flavor, just as toasting walnuts, pecans and other nuts brings out their nuttiness. Toasting gives coconut a beautiful brown color and takes it from soft to crisp, adding texture to your recipe in addition to color and flavor. It is easy to toast coconut in a skillet or in the oven, but it is ... Read More »

Fresh ginger is not as friendly looking as powdered ginger, which comes in a neat little canister along with all of the other dried spices. It goes into baked goods along with dry ingredients and requires no prep time. Fresh ginger, on the other hand, looks a little alien by comparison. The bulbous root is firm and it’s not obvious how to use it – ... Read More »

Pasteurization is the process of heating a food – usually a liquid – to a specific temperature for the purpose of slowing microbial growth, extending the shelf life of a product by slowing the spoilage process. The technique was first developed to prevent wine and beer from souring quickly, but it is very widely used today with dairy products because pasteurization actually halts the growth ... Read More »

There are lots of recipes that call for coarse salt these days. Coarse salt refers to sea salt or kosher salt, salt that has a much larger grain to it than common table salt – hence the name “coarse” salt. The reason that coarse salt is so popular is not that it is saltier or more flavorful than regular salt, but because it has a ... Read More »

The egg recall is still going strong, with over 550 million eggs recalled so far. If you happen to have some eggs that were explicitly listed in the recall, you can simply return them to the store for some new eggs. But if you’re concerned that other eggs might have been affected and not discovered yet (as many people are), does that mean that you ... Read More »

There are many recipes out there that call for melted chocolate, from brownies to cakes. Melted chocolate might not sound like a tricky ingredient, but it actually can be and is a place where many would be brownie-bakers run into problems. This is because chocolate tends to hold its shape as it melts (because the cocoa butter melts and the cocoa solids don’t), so unlike ... Read More »

I know that I’m not the only one who has gone through multiple nonstick frying pans over the years, replacing the pans as they lose their nonstickiness or treating them like regular pans and simply increasing the amount of oil that I cook with to keep food from sticking to it. I generally assumed that I was doing something wrong with my pans to mess ... Read More »

Food tv goes far beyond just instructional cooking shows these days. Cooking is entertainment, after all. I find that I am watching more food related shows than I used to because there are so many more available to me, but I also find that I opt to check out a food reality show or a food competition at least as often as I watch regular ... Read More »